Description

Anti-Surveillance Tool: A Book Smuggling Experiment
Code: https://editor.p5js.org/mlinhle617/sketches/WE1qQyrK2
Context: I come from Vietnam where freedom of speech and freedom of the press is very much constrained by censorship. Topics relating to political dissidents and acts of corruption by the Communist Party members are forbidden. Many writers and artists who have been vocal on such topics were imprisoned and exiled. Duong Thu Huong was one of the most prominent writers in Vietnam in the 80s with several best-sellers. Her works were popular because her characters’ struggles were relatable to the average Vietnamese person at the time. She often criticizes the repressive atmosphere created by the Communist government and Vietnamese patriarchal society. Her political views led to her being expelled from the Communist party and imprisoned. She finally managed to seek asylum in France, but her works were banned from being published in her home country. Her best-sellers from the 80s were also destroyed and banned. Paradise of the Blind was one of them. The book is about a young woman’s struggles between familial duty and forging her own path in life.
The message: Since the book can be found online (in the U.S., I’ve never heard about the book when I was in Vietnam), I wanted to see if I could smuggle this book to my friends in Vietnam who have never heard about this masterpiece. For this experiment, I chose to use a page with a paragraph that introduces the main character and her current situation with no political view yet, instead of the whole book.
The strategy: Hide the link to the page in a cute little xylophone game that looks like it’s designed for children. The background contains a morse code that says ASCII, which is a hint for the receiver to look up the ASCII code in Octal (because the numbers corresponding to the letters all contain 3 digits). The xylophone has notes that comes from the top and the receiver has to press the right tone bars that the notes land on. There are numbers on the tone bars. The notes comes in group of 3, to form a number that represents a letter. The full numbers are: 162 142 056 147 171 057 162 172 160 165 146 167 which will translate to a link that has the first page of the book.

Design Process

During my research, I found that visual artists generally enjoy more freedom than their peers in other fields, as long as they don’t portray nudity and sexuality or the Communist Party and its leaders in an unfavorable way. Because Vietnamese people have an apathetic attitude towards art, it is seen as lacking the power to influence them in the same way that literature can. Also, government officials lack the education needed to understand visual arts so they often can’t implement censorship unless the work is explicitly offensive to the Communist Party. Therefore, I think it’d be interesting to find a way to hide a piece of controversial literature in a piece of visual arts, something often underestimated in Vietnam. I want to hide the page in something that looks visually innocent and harmless. Xylophone is something that almost everyone knows and has played with as a child. I want it to have bright colors and look as juvenile as possible.

Reflection

The part that I found the hardest is adding sound to the xylophone. Even though the sound is not important to the message, a xylophone would not be a xylophone without sound. I looked through the p5.js sound library and found an example that uses Oscillator to generate musical notes. It was very close to what I was trying to do but I need to find a way to make it work with the rest of the code. So, I relied on online tutorials and the p5.js reference page to learn more about the sound library and how to use it. When I finally understood the code in the example, I was able to edit it to work with my sketch. Though the sound from the library doesn't sound like a xylophone, I think it was a great learning experience.